Co-location Service

Co-location Service is normally provided directly by a data center. Although, some big hosting companies too may provide co-location service to their clients. This type of hosting environment is usually deployed for large companies who require a good number of powerful servers for their day-to-day operations and also need them to be fully secured.

As a company you purchase your own servers and have them housed in a designated space or room in a data center, which is kept locked to debar access to anyone walking into the data center area. Only few technicians & administrators (who are company employees) are authorized to open and enter the room to carry out maintenance activities. The data center takes care of providing the required internet connectivity.

Any company that is particularly concerned about the security of their data would opt for such a facility. This includes banks, financial institutions, stock markets, health care companies, and other large corporations.

The company chooses what type of server hardware they will deploy, what OSes they will install and what software and security systems will run on them. Large companies have their own full-fledged IT department and are well equipped to decide what is good for them.

This service is far more expensive than renting out a cluster of dedicated servers. However, it is desirable for large companies to house their mission critical servers in this manner and have full control over them.

In most cases, the co-location provider may provide little or no support directly for their client's machines. The only services they provide consists of the electrical connection, Internet access, physical storage facilities for the server that will take care of installing the server in their premises and utilizing the overall infrastructure such as air-conditioning, stand-by power, fire-protection system, security. The server owner would have to deploy his own administrator to visit the data center to carry out any hardware upgrades or changes.